An Intimate Life

by Cheryl T. Cohen Greene

  On one of our regular weekend night dates I wore a button-down sweater, and Bill and I created a little game. He opened the top button. There were, I think, around eight in all. We decided that I would wear something similar on each of our next eight Saturday night dates and each time we met he would undo one additional button.

  I started to become concerned around that time by how much I really liked sexual arousal. I knew other girls were curious. My friends and I passed around books like Tropic of Cancer and Lady Chatterley’s Lover, and we talked about sex, but it was always in an oblique way. We never discussed what we liked or what felt good or what we wanted to try. I assumed that my friends kept their hands above the covers at night and didn’t feel the kind of excitement I did. No doubt, they wanted to know about sex, but I wanted to know about it and experience it. I worried that I was the only girl who really liked sexual feelings. What did this mean about me? If girls who did it before marriage were whores, what were girls who did it and liked it? I didn’t know the word for those girls, and I worried that I was the sole member of my gender who craved sex. For young women of this era, sex was currency and virginity was a bargaining chip. Your sex appeal wasn’t about how much pleasure you could get, it was about what kind of man you could land. It was to be parlayed into a stable, monogamous future life. Virginity was not to be squandered on pleasure. I couldn’t stop exploring with my boyfriend, though. I started experimenting with touching Bill’s penis. At first I just ran my fingers over the bulge in his trousers. Then I put my hand down his pants and held it. I didn’t know what, exactly, you were supposed to do with these things, but I was learning.

  Finally, the Saturday night came when it was time to undo the last button. We sat in Bill’s car on Kernwood Road kissing and caressing each other. Then Bill ran his eyes up and down the stack of buttons on my shirt. We climbed over the white vinyl seats of his Studebaker. He undid the first seven buttons of my blouse. It was early spring and suddenly it struck me that we had gone from winter to spring in the course of eight buttons. We looked at each other and laughed. He undid the last button and I sat there in my bra, which he quickly unhooked.

  Luckily, Bill couldn’t fully see my body. The only light that filtered in came from the moon and the weak streetlight a couple of yards away from us. Also, I was lying back, which made me look slimmer than when I stood. Yet, there were also fleeting moments when Bill made me feel so beautiful that my insecurities melted away, and I was fully in the delightful moment.

  Bill kissed my breasts and pulled gently at my nipples. I was already wet when he took off his pants.

  I discovered with Bill that night that I loved finger fucking. I also learned that when I got really excited I got wet, wetter than I had ever gotten when I masturbated. Sometimes I worried I’d peed after a make-out session with Bill. Remember, this was the late fifties, when sex education for most girls consisted of “If you do it before you’re married you’re a slut.” For Catholic girls like me it was “If you do it before you’re married you’re a slut and you’ll fry in hell unless you confess.”

  He slowly slid his finger inside of me and my vagina started to pulse. Then he gently glided his finger out and slid his penis in. I panicked. Would I get pregnant? He must have seen the fear in me because he whispered, “I promise I’ll pull out.” I was so anxious that all I could think was that I wanted this to be over. I loved the foreplay, but penis-in-vagina sex had consequences so dire that I couldn’t possibly relax enough to enjoy it. He thrust in and out of me and I held my breath. Finally, he pulled out and came on my mons. Oh, no! Did sperm have some kind of homing device that propelled it into the vagina? I tilted my pelvis up just to be on the safe side.

  Bill and I started going “all the way” almost every time we could be alone. I wasn’t happy about this. I was still terrified of becoming pregnant. I didn’t know how to talk about this with Bill, or even if I had any right to turn back. I had already gone all the way with him. Some unspoken rule dictated that I couldn’t hold out now. Bill knew as much about sex as I did. He was convinced that if we had intercourse during my period I couldn’t get pregnant, so he came inside of me on those occasions. We were incredibly lucky. As much as I adored Bill, I also started to resent him. He wanted to have intercourse every time we saw each other, while I preferred the risk-free thrill of foreplay. Then I could relax and enjoy the electrifying sensation of arousal and usually I could have an orgasm by being stimulated by only his finger. But for Bill, sexual play had to culminate with his penis inside my vagina or he was unsatisfied. Since I had no vocabulary for expressing my sexual preferences and no belief that I had a right to, I quietly went along and did my best to keep my resentment under wraps.

  Around this time, I started having a problem with my skirts: The zippers kept breaking. One Saturday as I sat in the living room reading a magazine, my mother came into the room clutching one of my skirts. “I don’t understand how this keeps happening,” she said, showing me the ripped zipper. “I told you,” I said, “I broke it pulling it too hard in the bathroom.” My dad, who was fiddling with the radio in the corner of the room, shot me a look that made it plain he didn’t buy it. My zippers got torn in Bill’s cramped, steamed-up Studebaker, not in a rush to pee. Dad didn’t know this exactly, but he knew my excuse was fishy.

  My father barely ever said a word to me about sex, but he still let me know his attitude about me having it. I remember one instance when I was sitting on the front porch with my parents, and my mother was recounting some shocking news she had heard earlier that day. Her friend Jackie’s sixteen-year-old daughter was pregnant. When I heard this a chill ran down my spine. That could be me, and if it was I’d have to kill myself, I thought. Just then, as if he knew what I was thinking, my father looked squarely at me and said, “If you ever get pregnant, don’t come home.”

  Often after sex Bill and I talked about what we hoped for in life. Bill always came back to one thing. He wanted to marry me soon. We would get an apartment and have a child together. He would go to night school and then we would buy a house with a yard big enough for a garden. Since we weren’t using birth control, pregnancy was a constant fear for me. For Bill, it was simply an eventuality. If I got pregnant we’d get married immediately. We would tell my beloved grandmother and she would help us. If I didn’t get pregnant we would get married the minute I turned eighteen. He explained that he wanted to be settled down with a wife and child by the time he was twenty-one.

  Even though I was crazy about Bill, I didn’t understand what the rush was. I was fifteen, still a child myself. I wanted to experience more of everything. I knew I didn’t want to be married so young. I wanted to explore life, and—yes—have other lovers. If I married and had a child now I would choke any possibility of any of that happening. Yet, when Bill talked about marriage and children he seemed so sweet and sincere that I couldn’t bring myself to tell him what I really thought.

  I continued to go to confession every Saturday, usually with some of my friends. Now not only was I confessing to sex with myself, but with Bill, and I was judged not just for one odious sin, but two. The evidence that I was a very bad girl was mounting. I was breaking sacred law by myself and with someone else. I knew it was wrong, but I couldn’t stop. It could only mean that I was inherently evil and weak. What’s more, I had begun having thoughts that no decent person would entertain. I was secretly questioning much of what I had been taught about God. Why, I wondered, would God give us sexuality and then condemn us for acting on it? Why did only marriage sanctify sex? More broadly, I wondered how a book that was written by mere mortals could reveal the mind of God. Did this mean I was further incriminating myself in the eyes of the Almighty, or did it mean I was starting to think for myself? Was it the final step toward eternal damnation or the first stirrings of liberation? And what would liberation mean? Would it mean letting all this dogma go? If so, what would take its place? There was a war raging inside me, and it may sound melodramatic, but I really
believed that if I chose the wrong side there would, literally, be hell to pay.

  In the fall of 1959, Bill enrolled in a local college. We continued to see each other after school and on the weekends. I had worried that going to college would change how Bill saw me. He would be around older girls who were living more adult lives and would probably make me look like a kid, which, of course, I was. My fears turned out to be unwarranted. Bill seemed even more enthusiastic about us getting married and having a child after he started college. He would talk dreamily about what it would be like when we were married. I still couldn’t see what his rush was. This didn’t so much become a wedge between us, but more of a painful signal that we were headed in two different directions and neither one of us could change course. I tried to ignore it. I told myself that he would change. He would realize we were both too young to get married, much less have a child. He would let it go. Yet Bill continued to talk about it in the same loving, genuine way he always had.

  I had to gather a lot of courage to finally tell him that I could not do what he wanted. One Saturday as we lay on the grass at Forest River Park, I looked him the eyes and said, “Bill, I just turned fifteen. I’m not even out of high school yet. I’m not ready to be a mother. I want to know more about life and to live more. I need other experiences—and so do you. If you can handle that and wait for me then maybe when we’re older we’ll get married. I don’t expect you not to date. I’m sorry, but that’s how I feel.” I realized that I had just broken up with him, and so did he.

  To my shock, a few days later Bill told me that he had left college and volunteered for the Marines. He would ship out to Paris Island for basic training within a week. I was flabbergasted. Why was he in such a rush? I was worried about him too. Bill was strong, but Marine Corps basic training was brutal. When I asked him why he did it, he just said, “I need to get my head straight.” In the Marines? I thought.

  When it came time for Bill to leave for basic training, I drove out to the recruiting station in Peabody with him and his parents. I felt awful. If something happened to him, it would be my fault. Then I would truly be a terrible person. We said a tearful goodbye and on the way back to Salem I was riddled with confusion. Had I made a mistake? Would I ever again find someone so nice who would love me as much as he did? Only a year ago I couldn’t have imagined all of this happening. Life was unfolding fast.

  It wasn’t long before I met a boy who feared getting a girl pregnant about as much as I feared becoming pregnant. It happened, again, at Teen Town. John Leshky was known as a “good catch.” He was a top athlete. A football quarterback, basketball star, and a respected track runner, John was also handsome and popular. He was tall and had intense hazel eyes. Emboldened by my experience in the dating world, I asked him to dance one night at Teen Town and we quickly became a couple. Being his girlfriend gave me a certain prestige among the other kids at school, and I liked it. Sometimes when the other girls looked at us I sensed a mixture of awe and envy that boosted my fragile teenage ego. As the girlfriend of one of the most revered boys in the social hierarchy of high school, I gained new respect among my peers.

  John was a highly recruited athlete with scholarship offers from some of the top American universities. Everyone—including John—agreed that he was something special and a bright future lay ahead of him. The last thing he wanted was to get a girl pregnant and wind up a working stiff saddled with a wife and kids. Unlike Bill, he had no misty visions of a big house and a loving wife and child eagerly awaiting him at home. Perfect, I thought. No more panicking. No more resentment about doing something that I thought was way too risky just to please my boyfriend.

  John was about as far from Bill in his temperament as anyone could get. Bill was sweet, charming, loving, and considerate. John was brash and arrogant. He could be fun, but he could also be cruel, especially if you weren’t one of the kids who made up the galaxy of cool that swirled around him. He was also unlike Bill in that he wasn’t much for rangy, thoughtful conversations. Our communication was generally superficial and unsatisfying. He wasn’t my friend, much less my soul mate, which was what I yearned for. Still, there was a lot of physical chemistry and, best of all, I now had the most foolproof birth control on the planet—no intercourse.

  This was around the time that I discovered the beatnik scene and started going to the Woodbury Tavern and the King’s Rook, two local cafés where the coffee and the poetry flowed. Becky, Marcie, some other friends, and I started hanging out there our sophomore year. We would don all-black outfits, line our eyes with black pencil, and head out to one of the cafés to spend the night listening to poetry that was sometimes impenetrable, sometimes inspiring, and drink Italian sodas that came in exotic flavors like raspberry and tamarindo. It all made us feel supremely cool.

  Sometimes I brought a notebook with me and tried to write my own poetry. It was pretty bad, but probably not worse than some of what I heard from the stage. Once, when I was at the Woodbury Tavern, I scribbled my name in my notebook and then wrote “Leshky” after it. “Cheryl Leshky,” I said softly to myself. I didn’t like the way it sounded. No, John wasn’t my soul mate, or future husband. He was just someone who I could have a lot of great, worry-free sex with—or so I thought.

  As with Bill, John and I spent a lot of time on Kernwood Road steaming up the windows of his car. The rumors of the rapist cop had dissipated. I still felt plenty of guilt and fear about what I might face in the afterlife, but I was at least certain I wouldn’t get pregnant.

  One night, John had barely put the car in park before we started kissing and grabbing each other. Along with being a great kisser, John also had a wonderful touch. Most of the time I got aroused the instant he laid a hand on me. John quickly slipped off my skirt and underwear and started masturbating me. Slow at first, then fast, then slow again. It was a rhythm that moment-by-moment brought me closer to climax. My self-consciousness fell away, and I disappeared into it. Slow, fast, slow. Then I had a mind-blowing orgasm, the first one I’d had with John. I moaned with delight. At that moment I loved him. Maybe he was my soul mate, maybe we connected physically in a way that was impossible otherwise. Would you know your soul mate by the strength of your orgasm? I couldn’t keep it to myself. I was going to tell him that I loved him. I opened my eyes just before I opened my mouth, and what I saw rendered me silent. He looked disgusted and shocked. As he pulled back, my legs flopped away from him. I suddenly realized how cold it was inside the car. “You’re a sex maniac!” he said. At that moment I felt like I had been struck. I had thought we were in this together. Why was he masturbating me if he didn’t want to give me pleasure? Was a certain amount of pleasure okay and any more than that sick? Was there a pleasure limit? I’d brought him to climax many times. Were only males entitled to orgasm?

  The phrase “double standard” wasn’t part of my lexicon at that time, but it sure was part of my life. If I had thought that judgment ended at the confessional or with my mother’s generation, I was proven wrong. I can’t remember anything else that happened that night. John and I stayed together for a couple of years, but I never had an orgasm with him again. In fact, I didn’t have another one until I was nineteen and met the man who would change my life.

  5.

  no magic: george

  “Look, I just want to be able to have sex. How is this supposed to help?” My second session with George wasn’t going any better than the first had two weeks earlier. I was teaching him how to do Kegel exercises and after only one round of practice he stopped. When I was in mid-inhale, demonstrating the exercise, I opened my eyes to find him smirking at me.

  “Kegels can help you feel arousal more intensely and give you greater control over the PC muscle. Both will help you to build up the time you can sustain an erection and defer orgasm,” I said. I tried to keep my tone even. Getting irritated wouldn’t help. George’s eyes narrowed with anger, as if I had just insulted him.

  It was 1974 and George, at fifty-two, had come to see m
e for premature ejaculation. He had a wife and a mistress and he could have sex with neither because he couldn’t maintain an erection for more than a few minutes. Because he couldn’t talk about it, his mistress was drifting away and he swore he could feel his wife losing respect for him. Two people to have sex with and not one to talk to, I thought.

  Madelyn, George’s therapist, had warned me that he was cantankerous. That alone I could have dealt with. She had hoped that doing hands-on work would help because George resisted nearly everything she tried with him.

  The real problem, I was now convinced, wasn’t that he was a curmudgeon. It was that he expected miracles and didn’t want to put effort toward resolving the issue he faced. He wanted his problem to simply go away without investing any time or energy in building new skills, improving communication, or reimagining his sex life. Well, there is no magic potion, no open sesame, for overcoming sexual problems. It takes work and a commitment to change.

  “George, there are solutions to your problem, but you have to be willing to learn some new skills and to communicate better. That takes time.”

  He rested his broad forehead in both hands and let out a sigh.

  It wasn’t anything I hadn’t told him in our first session, when I should have concluded that I could not help George. For most of our two hours together he was silent, and when I asked him a question his answer came in monosyllables, apart from one notable exception. I’d tried to talk to him about how sexuality changes as we age. Big mistake. He insisted he still had the prowess of a twenty-two-year-old. That was when he let me know that as a kid growing up in Indiana he had been awarded medals for being the fastest runner on his track team. In his twenties he had won marathons and he still did daily long-distances runs. He was faster and stronger than his twenty-five-year-old son. “Nothing’s changed with me,” he said.